


when the lights go out (run away with me)

by leetheshark



Category: IT (1990), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Abusive Parent, Bisexual Richie Tozier, Car Sex, Gay Eddie Kaspbrak, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Non-Explicit Sex, Semi-Public Sex, Smoking, Virgin Eddie Kaspbrak
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-16
Updated: 2019-12-16
Packaged: 2021-02-26 20:47:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21814954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leetheshark/pseuds/leetheshark
Summary: Eddie’s settled into his life driving limos, and Richie comes to New York.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 18
Kudos: 216





	when the lights go out (run away with me)

**Author's Note:**

> _you make me feel like  
>  i could be driving you all night  
> and i’ll find your lips in the streetlights  
> i wanna be there with you_
> 
> _baby, take me to the feeling  
>  i’ll be your sinner in secret  
> when the lights go out  
> run away with me  
> run away with me_
> 
> -carly rae jepsen, [run away with me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeccAtqd5K8)
> 
> people asked for more 1990 reddie and i’m here to give the people what they want
> 
> shout out to my dear friend Jacket for (1) beta-ing this fic, (2) explaining to me what a sedan is, and (3) making fun of me for not knowing what a sedan is, among various other stupidity crimes. love you 💙

Eddie works late nights when he drives. It’s when the talk shows are, when the parties are, when the darkness closes in on his car and there’s no one around except for Eddie, the bleary headlights in front of him, and whoever’s ignoring him in the backseat.

(They don’t always ignore him, but usually they do, and Eddie likes that just fine. He lives in loneliness, and he doesn’t expect a reprieve from any celebrity who’s paying him to do a job.)  


* * *

  
_“If you want to poison your mind with trash—” Sonia hisses—"it’s none of my business!”_

It isn’t the first time Eddie and Sonia fight over Eddie’s television habits, and it won’t be the last. But if she doesn’t want Eddie to go out (and it’s not like Eddie has anywhere to go, anyway), he has to occupy his time somehow.

Sonia makes her way up the stairs, leaving Eddie alone in the dark living room, and Eddie’s glad for it. “It’s not trash, Ma!” he calls out after her. “It’s Richie Tozier!”

“I never liked that man!”

 _Yeah,_ Eddie thinks, _well I do._

Eddie’s been watching Richie Tozier’s late night show for a while now. He isn’t that funny, but he makes Eddie smile anyway, curled up on the couch at night with a pillow in his lap and a mug of decaffeinated tea on the coffee table, dreaming about knowing someone like Richie even though Eddie barely knows anyone these days. He thinks, sometimes, that Richie reminds him of someone, but he can never think of who.  


* * *

  
“What’s your name?” he asks, and Eddie stammers, because no one ever asks him that. Most people don’t care, and if they do, they just sneak a glance at his monogrammed shirt.

“Eddie. Eddie Kaspbrak.”

“Richie Tozier.”

“I know,” Eddie says, smiling sheepishly when he realizes that, maybe, that was a stupid thing to say. It’s not like he needs to impress the guy. But he kind of wants to. Richie just smiles and offers a hand for Eddie to shake.

Eddie’s shaken a lot of people’s hands (and usually he digs into the hand sanitizer he keeps in the glove box as soon as they’re not looking), but something about Richie’s touch makes him feel like he’s never touched _anyone_ before, and if he has, it wasn’t real. Not like this. Eddie doesn’t understand why he can feel like he knows someone so well just from seeing them on TV, so maybe it’s just his lonely soul searching for connection. Or maybe it’s something else. It feels like something else.

Eddie leaves Richie at the curb to pull around his sedan, opens the door for him, goes through the motions. And then they’re on the road, the bright white glow of the airport fading into the streelit city night.

“I’m hosting SNL tonight,” Richie says. Eddie knows.

“I wish I could be at home to see it,” Eddie admits.

“You a fan?”

“Mhm.”

“Mind if I run my monologue by you?”  


* * *

  
It’s forty-five minutes from LaGuardia to 30 Rock with traffic. Eddie’s hands are clammy, and it’s not just because the heat is cranked up high against the winter chill.

The car seems smaller with Richie Tozier in it. It’s with reluctance that Eddie pulls up in front of the building, parallel parking with nearly two decades of ease. He shifts the car into park and hops out to open Richie’s door, but Richie’s already pushing it open and stepping onto the sidewalk.

Richie leans against the car with his full, lanky height, and pulls a pack of Winstons from his pants pocket. “Want to hang out for a minute? I don’t have to go in just yet.”

Eddie’s heart skips a beat. “Sure.” He can see his breath in the cold air. It bites at his skin through his uniform shirt, and he zips up his black jacket with shivering hands.

Most people aren’t taller than Eddie. Richie is. Eddie didn’t pay attention in the airport, but he notices now. Eddie could have guessed, had a rough idea of Richie’s height, but standing in front of him is different.

Eddie looks up at Richie through his glasses, feels embarrassed, and looks quickly away.

“You want one?” Richie asks, raising a cigarette to his mouth.

“No, thanks. I have asthma.”

“Oh, sorry.”

Richie starts to put the cigarette back, but Eddie clarifies, “It won’t bother me if you smoke.”

“You sure?”

Eddie nods. He knows it’s atypical, but he chalks it up to years of people smoking in his car without asking. Richie puts the cigarette to his lips again and lights it and Eddie watches, watches Richie’s mouth and his hands and the smoke as it dissipates into the dark, starless sky. The cigarette burns, a red-hot beacon in the cold night. Eddie can’t feel Richie’s skin, but he knows it’s warm, too. He aches to close the distance between them. To touch Richie, just once more. He can’t.

“I should go,” Richie says, after a minute. His voice is regretful, or maybe it’s just Eddie. “You’ll be here after the show?”

“Sure thing.”  


* * *

  
Eddie lives his life on the outskirts.

He haunts the web of city streets, moving in the spaces between anything real, a silent specter on the edge of those lives he wishes he could live.

But with Richie, it’s different.

Richie comes back to New York, every couple of weeks. For talk shows, live shows, meetings. He always calls Eddie, and Eddie always goes, even when he has to change the schedule, because time with Richie feels like holding onto sun-warmed sand, hot and fleeting.

“You got other drivers?” Richie asks, the third time he’s in Eddie’s car. “Or is it just you?”

“We have other drivers. Why, you tired of me?” By now, Eddie’s comfortable enough with Richie to joke around, and the banter feels familiar. It gives Eddie something to hang on to.

“Must be lucky, then, since I always get you.”

Eddie doesn’t know if he should tell Richie that he always takes his rides on purpose. Or that he does it with such care, and hides it from his employees and his mother, because somehow it feels like it’s Eddie’s alone. Like if he tells anyone, it will end.

Eddie drives Richie where he needs to go, and then back to the airport, efficient and professional except for when they sit in the car talking for a few extra minutes, or when they stand outside while Richie smokes, blowing bitter gray into the cool night. Once, Eddie asks for a hit, half because he wants to see what it’s like, and half because he wants his lips to touch something Richie’s have also touched, even though Eddie doesn’t admit that to himself.

(It isn’t that Eddie doesn’t think about kissing Richie. He does. _Oh,_ he does.)

Eddie learns things about Richie, too—that the two of them read the same comics as kids, that Richie’s almost as lonely as Eddie is, that Richie’s in the middle of a third messy divorce but that he still wears the ring when he makes TV appearances. He says it’s for the press, but Eddie gets the feeling that it’s really because he doesn’t want to let go just yet.

Eddie tells Richie that his mother knows him, and hates him, and Richie says the old woman must have taste. “Not even a little,” Eddie says, laughing, and it strikes him that he can’t remember the last time he said anything bad about Sonia. He can’t remember the last time he felt free enough to, or had anyone to talk to. Richie’s the closest thing to a friend Eddie’s had in a while.

It feels like stolen time, like running away together, but it never lasts long enough. Richie always has somewhere to go, and so does Eddie—back home to Sonia, back home like always.  


* * *

  
Eddie’s waiting for Richie, knees pulled up against the steering wheel, toying with a ballpoint pen and staring at the half-finished crossword puzzle in his lap. His aspirator rests on the dashboard, like it always does, and Eddie sneaks a glance at it every once in a while to make sure it’s still there. Lost in thought, Eddie crunches the plastic pen between his back molars, realizing after a second how unsanitary it is and ripping it from his mouth, just as a tap on the window startles him out of his skin.

It’s Richie.

Eddie knows Richie can’t see him through the tinted windows, but he still kind of feels like Richie does. He rolls down the window a few inches, apologizes, and unlocks the car with the button on the door.

Richie slides into the car. He’s just done Letterman, and he glows with a job well done. His cheeks are flushed and his hair tousled, a little sweaty from exertion and hot stage lights, and Eddie tries not to stare too much in the rear-view mirror.

Richie looks good.

Well, Richie always looks good.

“How’d it go?” Eddie asks, even though he already knows the answer.

“Swimmingly, my dear,” Richie says in that smug, mocking way he always downplays his own achievements. Richie never plays himself up, unless he’s joking. He knows other people will do it for him. “Just swimmingly.”

It’s times like these that Eddie feels lucky to be in Richie’s orbit, to be close to something special, even if Richie probably doesn’t think about him when he’s back home in California.

Eddie sighs, hand hovering over the gear shift, about to put the car in drive when Richie speaks up from the back—

“Hey, Eddie?”

Eddie stills. Richie’s leaning forward, his hand sliding over the edge of the driver’s seat, nearly touching Eddie’s shoulder. His eyes lock with Eddie’s in the rear-view mirror. Eddie can’t see them close enough to tell what color they are, but he thinks brown, or maybe green. “I don’t mean to be too forward,” Richie says, and Eddie’s heart nearly stops. “But my flight’s not for another few hours. You want to come back here?”

“Do you mean…?”

“Yeah,” Richie says. It’s a confession. “Yeah, if you want to.”

Breathing hard—but still breathing, still breathing just fine—Eddie twists around in his seat. His eyes meet Richie’s fully. They’re green, Eddie realizes. A deep, mossy green. They gleam with uncertainty, reflecting the dashboard lights. When he looks closer, he can see the edges of Richie’s contact lenses around his irises.

And then Richie’s face falls. “Shit, Eds, I’m sorry, I thought—"

Eddie leans forward and kisses him.

His eyes slip shut as his lips bump Richie’s, and Richie kisses back without hesitation. A soft whimper escapes Eddie’s throat and fills the small space, so much closer and louder than the muffled sounds outside.

Eddie always sort of thought Richie would taste like cigarettes, or alcohol, or any of those things novels say men taste like—but he doesn’t. He doesn’t taste like anything, but his kiss still sends lightning down Eddie’s spine, sharp enough it almost hurts, setting him alight with a need that feels too big to fit in his body.

Eddie’s never kissed anyone before, but Richie makes it easy. Richie’s mustache grazes Eddie’s lip, rough and strange. His wedding band catches on Eddie’s hair when he runs his fingers through it, and maybe it should hurt, but somehow it only feels good.

Eddie stumbles over the median between the two front seats to climb into the back. He crashes into the warm, solid wall of Richie’s body, finding his easy way into Richie’s arms and his lap. Richie envelops him—in his kiss, in the scent of cologne, in the warmth of that sweet human contact that Eddie never, ever gets.

Eddie watches movies and reads romance novels and shrivels away in his ache for something real and if this is it, if this is that something, then maybe it’s what Eddie’s whole lonesome life has been building up to.

And what _is_ it—a hook-up in the backseat of his car?

Is that what’s happening?

Eddie wants it, wants it badly, but some deep shame inside of him is screaming that this isn’t him. That he isn’t the kind of person who does this kind of thing. But what kind of person is that? The kind of person who sleeps with men?

Eddie is that kind of person, even though he’s denied it for so long. There’s nothing to deny anymore. He’s laid bare. Richie knows him, and he knows Richie, and it’s _good_ —it’s better than Eddie ever thought it could be.

It’s a last ditch effort to break it off (even though Eddie doesn’t really want to), to go back to what Eddie knows when he breaks the kiss and says, “I won’t do it without a condom.”

“Fine with me, baby,” Richie assures, between quick, indulgent kisses. “I got condoms.”  


* * *

  
There are some things Eddie’s never felt before.

The heat of the car’s A/C system on his naked skin. The feeling of Richie’s hands moving over his body, like Richie’s trying to memorize every detail of him. The suggestion that Eddie’s worth it—worth kissing, worth going all the way with in the backseat, worth memorizing.

The tickle of Richie’s mustache and the searing-hot touch of his hungry mouth as he sucks hickeys into Eddie’s skin—only where Eddie’s clothes will cover, because Richie doesn’t have to ask to know that Eddie doesn’t want his mother to see. Eddie’s clothes can cover a lot.

There are things he _has_ felt before—it’s the yearning Eddie feels every day, magnified and given a name. It’s the fantasies deep in his mind, those things he might have dreamed about Richie Tozier if he let himself, before he met Richie in person, before all of this.

Eddie gives Richie the reins because, even if he had _any_ experience, he knows Richie would have worlds more. Richie shows it. He figures Eddie out in an instant, like they’ve been doing this for years. Figures out what Eddie likes, what he doesn’t like. What makes him sigh and moan and clutch at the leather seats.

It’s too much and too little. More than Eddie ever thought he could handle, but over too soon.  


* * *

  
Eddie comes down, bare chest heaving, tangled with Richie against the sticky leather seats. His hair sticks to his forehead with sweat, and he feels too weak to do anything but bask in the warmth of Richie’s body.

Richie reaches up and slides his thumb over Eddie’s cheek, and no matter how many times Richie’s done it tonight, it still makes Eddie shiver. “So—” Richie says, quirking a smile that Eddie knows means a bad joke is coming. “You do this with all your clients, or am I just special?”

“I’ve, uh, never actually done it before.”

“Slept with a client?”

Blushing, Eddie ducks away from Richie’s touch. Maybe he’s said too much.

“Or slept with anyone?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Richie’s face falls, and the tender silence hits Eddie almost hard enough to bruise. But Richie doesn’t press the subject, and Eddie is grateful, because he doesn’t need someone mocking him, not now. He doesn’t think Richie would, but Eddie’s always afraid of how people will react to him.

Eddie untangles himself from Richie, as much as he can in the cramped backseat, and starts to pick up his clothes.

He’s buttoning up his shirt when Richie speaks again. “You think maybe I could come back, sometime, just to see you?”

Eddie looks down at his hands, because he feels like he has to hide the smile growing on his face. “Yeah,” he says. “I’d like that.”

“Maybe we could get a hotel. I have a feeling you don’t want to bring me home to mom.”

Eddie barks a self-conscious laugh. “Maybe if you buy me dinner first,” he jokes.

“Sure.” Richie smiles. “It’s a date.”

Eddie’s been on dates, before. Never with a man. Never with anyone he actually liked.

Richie shifts to sit up and reaches out, tangling his fingers in Eddie’s hair to pull him in once more for a kiss. A hand on Richie’s bare chest, Eddie melts into him.

“You do this with all your drivers?” Eddie counters.

“Only the cute ones,” Richie says. After a second, he adds, “Nah. Just you.”

**Author's Note:**

> [hit me up on tumblr](https://geislieb.tumblr.com/) ✌️


End file.
